WILD VOICES
Vandenbusche and John Hrovat portage their crew’s 33-pound Caravel boat during their 1972 expedition down the Black Canyon of the Gunnison River. photo courtesy of Duane Vandenbusche
Dr. Duane Vandenbusche Gunnison Valley virtuoso Dr. Duane Vandenbusche is the first-ever Western Slope chronicler to be named Colorado State Historian in the position’s 96-year history B Y M O R G A N T I LT O N
Duane Vandenbusche stood on the gravel bar, blanketed with splintered debris and rocks, peering down the Narrows, one of the most dangerous sections of The Black Canyon of the Gunnison River in Colorado. Vandenbusche, then 35 years old, leaned against the jutting corner of the cliff, completely alert and trying to decode the obstacles downriver.
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he canyon bottlenecked to 44 feet wide with no shore, and its vertical walls towered more than 2,000 feet above the expeditionists’ sopping wet boots. Vandenbusche and his two friends, David Nix and John Hrovat, could not see beyond the upcoming bend. But a foamy current was in sight, a sign of Whirlpool Rapid, which immediately followed this tight artery. It was 1972. The base of the dark rock was lightertoned, near the water’s surface, where the levels surged from winter runoff — yet another sign of the wild and unpredictable environment. They were more than halfway through their four-day, 53-mile venture through the canyon, from the old railroad town of Sapinero to the town of Lazear, and completely immersed. The canyon walls ranged from 500 to 2,700 feet high. They wanted to find out if they could thread the entire length of the Black Canyon. “A 25-foot waterfall drop waits for you at the end of The Narrows, if you don’t get out. You have to brush the left wall and exit the water on the left side before reaching the waterfall. It’s a great adventure,” Vandenbusche said. Prior to Vandenbusche’s expedition, the first known footsteps at the Dr. Duane Vandenbusche, a professor at Western Colorado University in Gunnison, Colorado, recently made history as the first-ever Western Slope chronicler to be named Colorado State Historian in the position’s 96-year history. photo courtesy of Western Colorado University
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A D V E N T U R E P R O . u s
bottom of the gorge were of the Tabeguache, a nomadic band of the Ute people, who lived in the region and feared the dark canyon’s raging rapids. “The canyon was called ‘Black,’ because of its depth, its dark and vertical walls, and because in sections of the gorge, the sun shines only 33 minutes a day. Some canyons of the American West are longer and some are deeper, but none combines the depth, narrowness, darkness and dread of the Black Canyon,” Vandenbusche later recorded in “The Black Canyon of the Gunnison,” one of 11 books the 83-year-old has published on western Colorado. Few others had ever attempted to discover the perilous Black. In 1900, a five-man crew called the Pelton Party optimistically pushed off from Cimarron to explore the river in its entirety. Their wooden boats, each 300 pounds, had proven unfit for the turbulent rapids and endless portages above shallow stretches, violent zones and over pyramids of humongous boulders. After 21 days and 14 miles, the party climbed out of the canyon, defeated. Noting their missteps, William Torrence and engineer Abraham Fellows entered the canyon on foot, where they swam and scrambled for 10 days with an inflatable rubber air mattress in tow the following year. They had been commissioned by the U.S. Geological Survey to locate a site for the Gunnison Tunnel, which would transport Gunnison River water to save the Uncompahgre Valley. They succeeded.
